Hushed in Death

  Instead, he left Vera to watch the car and went to the door of the Watchman. Because the time had gone past three, the pub was closed for the afternoon and would not open again until half-past six. Lamb rapped on the door soundly and added in a loud, clear voice, “It’s Chief Inspector Lamb, Mr. Hitchens. Open the door, please.”

  He waited patiently for nearly a minute and was about to thump on the door a second time when it swung open. Horace Hitchens stood in the doorway, looking sleepy and disheveled, as if he might have been napping.

  “What is it?” he said. “I told you all I know yesterday.”

  “I have some new information.”

  “What new information?”

  “I’d rather discuss it inside.”

  Hitchens retreated a step. “All right, but Theresa’s not here.”

  Lamb doubted the truth of that. But he did not dispute it with Hitchens as he had no need this time to speak with Theresa. He stepped through the door and went into the darkened main room of the pub. Hitchens did not bother to turn on a light, nor did he offer Lamb a seat. “What’s your new information, then?” he asked.

  “A witness overheard Joseph Lee speaking to you when Lee returned to the pub after Alan Fox punched him. This person said that Lee told you that he intended to ‘ruin’ Alan Fox and that Fox had no way to stop him from doing so. Did Lee tell you this?”

  After a couple of seconds, Hitchens said, “Yeah, he said that.”

  “Do you know what he meant by it—how he intended to ruin Fox and why Fox couldn’t stop him?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. Lee was the type who liked to mouth off. He had a bigger mouth than he had a brain. I didn’t put much stock in much of anything he said, as I told you yesterday.”

  “Perhaps Lee had some information about Alan Fox’s relationship with your daughter.” Lamb was fishing. But it seemed that Hitchens took the bait.

  “Here now, what are you getting at? I’ve already told you that my daughter has nothing to do with Fox and had nothing to do with Lee.”

  “Was Joseph Lee blackmailing you, Mr. Hitchens?”

  “Absolutely not! You’re off the bloody beam.”

  Hitchens pointed to the door and shouted, “Now get out. You’ve no call to come here and disparage myself and my daughter.”

  “Very well,” Lamb said. “But I assure you, Mr. Hitchens, that the truth will come to the surface. It always does.”

  When he stepped outside, Lamb found Sergeant Cashen standing by the car chatting with Vera. The uniformed men Cashen had overseen that day were gathered near the war memorial in the center of the green, smoking cigarettes.

  “All finished, then, Sergeant?” Lamb asked.

  “Yes, sir. Constable Lamb was just telling me about the car troubles you had today.”

  “Yes, but we’ve managed to get it squared away, luckily enough. What did you find, then?”

  Vera listened in as Cashen delivered to Lamb a rundown of what he and his team had learned. All of it was in line with what Rivers had reported earlier. For the most part, people denied having known Joseph Lee. A few people said they had briefly engaged him in conversation and found him unappealing—a bore and a braggart. Although two people, both men, had seen Lee follow Fox out of the pub on the night in question, neither had followed them nor had they seen Lee and Fox fight near the church. Several people said they also had seen Lee in the pub on the night following his set-to with Fox, but had not seen Fox as well. None had noticed when Lee had left the pub on the night he was killed.

  Lamb thanked Cashen for his work and asked him to wait for Wallace and Rivers to return with their teams.

  “In the meantime, I’m going to stroll up the High Street and see if I can’t have another talk with Alan Fox,” he said.

  As he turned to go, he saw Vera moving across the green to join the uniformed men smoking by the memorial and considered this to be a positive development.

  As he ascended the hill, Lamb mused on how he did not yet have a good enough bead on Alan Fox. If Lee had possessed some sort of compromising information about Fox and had been using it to blackmail Fox, the latter, who appeared to have a rather generous private income, might have decided that he was better off paying up rather than attempting to silence Lee. Indeed, given the amount of cash they’d found in Lee’s cottage, it appeared that Lee had not been bleeding Fox too harshly. But all that might have changed if Lee, believing that Fox was about to “steal” Theresa Hitchens from him, had threatened to reveal Fox’s secret as he drunkenly confronted Fox by the church. Fox, who also apparently had been drunk, had slugged Lee. Lamb believed that Fox was too smart a man to have killed Lee in such a public place as the High Street, even while intoxicated. Fox therefore might have waited until the following night to creep up the hill to kill Lee.

  But was Fox capable of such violence? Janet Lockhart believed not and Brandt seemed unsure.

  As Lamb neared Fox’s cottage, he heard the sound of someone playing a piano coming from the rear garden. He went through the gate and into the garden where he found a scene identical to the one he’d found on the previous day—the red metal table dotted with empty ale bottles and the ceramic bowl brimming with cigarette butts; the garden shed with its door wide open, and, just within, the Victrola perched upon the small wooden table, a recording—the source of the music Lamb had heard—spinning upon it. He stood and listened to the music for a couple of seconds and found it enchanting enough, full of glissandos and rises and falls in pitch, volume, and tone that brought to mind the sound and movement of flowing water.

  As the music continued, he peeked into the shed, but saw no sign of Fox. From the door, he could see the canvas upon which Fox was working. Fox seemed to have done quite a bit of work on it since the previous day, having turned the greenish and blue blotches into what appeared to be a painting of the sea.

  He stepped into the shed and went to the easel. The painting, which he saw now was only partially finished, depicted in the foreground a single human hand—presumably from a drowning person—protruding from a dark green sea. What appeared to be a strand of sea grass clung to the outstretched fingers; near the hand, an ornate wide-brimmed woman’s hat, adorned with yellow ribbons and blue feathers, floated on the surface. The background was dominated by a twilight sky unobstructed by land forms and suffused with what appeared to be an almost infinite array of colors. Separating this sea and sky was a blurred horizon upon which the dark figure of a distant ship—a large ship; a liner, perhaps—appeared to be steaming away from the drowning woman, trailing a lazy plume of gray smoke that mingled with the colors of the sunset.

  As he moved to exit the shed, he stole a glance at the recording and found that it was Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Although rudimentary, his French was good enough for him to translate it as “Gaspard of the Night.” He had no idea who Gaspard was and did not care to know, but as he looked at the recording he noticed in reading its label that Gaspard de la Nuit had three movements, each with a name. The second and third were called, respectively, Le Gibet (which Lamb translated as “the Gallows”) and Scarbo, the meaning of which he did not know. But it was the title of the first movement—the movement to which he’d been listening—that truly caught his attention: Ondine.

  Lamb left the shed and went to the double doors that led into Fox’s cottage and peered through them but saw no one inside. He banged on the doors and announced himself. But Fox did not answer, leaving Lamb to wonder if Fox had passed out from drink or was purposely avoiding him, as he suspected Hornby was.

  He went round to the front door of the cottage and banged on it, but had no better luck there.

  Feeling uneasy, he retreated again down the hill.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BY THE TIME LAMB RETURNED AGAIN TO THE CAR, WALLACE AND Rivers and their teams had finished their canvasses and gathered by the green. After a quick debriefing—no one had discovered anything appreciably different from that which River and Cashen already had re
ported—the group decamped to Winchester.

  Back at the nick, Lamb received a briefing from Larkin, who had spent the day immersed in the papers and notebook they had removed from Lee’s cottage and checking on the backgrounds of Lee, Fox, Hornby, and the others.

  Only one of the people had a criminal record, Larkin reported. Joseph Lee.

  “In 1927 he was convicted of stealing nearly seventy-five quid worth of cash and jewelry from a passenger on an ocean liner he’d served on as a steward. He served a year in jail in Liverpool and was dismissed from the line—the Blue Star Line. At the time he was a first class cabin steward on a ship called the Algiers. It seems he spent some time working as a steward on liners.”

  Lamb immediately thought of the painting he’d seen in Fox’s studio an hour earlier. “Blue Star—that’s a bit of a tramp outfit isn’t it?” he said.

  “Well, it’s not Cunard, sir, no, but it might be a stretch to call it a tramp line. It does a fair amount of work out of Southampton, mostly to the Mediterranean—or at least it did until just before the war, when it apparently had to cut back a bit due to a decrease in demand. I’ve called the company offices to see what else I can find out about Lee’s tenure with them. I spoke with a clerk who promised to have someone of a higher rank get back to me. But they’ve not done so yet.”

  “When you speak with this ranking person ask him if they have any record of Lee serving on a ship in which someone went overboard during a voyage.” “Right.”

  “What did you say the name of the ship was—the one Lee was serving on when he was caught stealing?”

  “Algiers.”

  Lamb tried to recall if, in Fox’s painting, the departing liner had its name on its stern, but could not. He described the painting to Larkin.

  “Lee also pasted into one of his scrapbooks a few things from his days as a steward; after I spoke to the Blue Line man I checked the books to see if Lee had kept anything from that time and, sure enough, there it was,” Larkin said.

  He retrieved the scrapbook and opened it, so that Lamb could see of what he was speaking.

  “There’s a few dinner menus from first class and a couple of photographs of what I assume to be Lee, given what I saw of his face yesterday, posing with other uniformed people whom I assume were also employees of the shipping line,” Larkin said.

  Lamb studied the photos, several of which showed Lee wearing a light colored uniform that looked like that which a steward on a liner would wear. Other than Lee, he recognized no one in the snaps.

  “The menus come from three ships—Acadia, Winnipeg, and Algiers; two ships named after places in Canada and one after a Mediterranean port,” Larkin said. “The Blue Star man told me that until the war they sailed regularly to Nova Scotia, Boston, and Portland, Maine, along with their Mediterranean service, which called at Gibraltar and Malta, among other ports.”

  “And then there is this, sir,” Larkin said, flipping the pages until he reached a place where one was missing.

  “The book’s intact except for this page, which, as you can see, obviously has been torn out, and recently,” he said. “The pages have begun to yellow with age but the paper at the place where the page was torn is much lighter and newer looking.”

  Lamb ran his finger along the jagged, ripped edge of the page. “Have you anything else for me?” he asked.

  Larkin adjusted his glasses and opened a notebook on his desk.

  “I’ve also done some checking on Elton House,” he said. “It was owned for a time by a medical consortium based in Southampton that from 1919 through 1938 operated a sanatorium for people suffering from consumption. Just as with the shipping line, I called the company headquarters and spoke to a representative there who was helpful once I told him I was calling from the police. He said the company bought the house from the estate of Lady Catherine Elton in March 1919. Apparently the place had sat vacant from the time of her acquittal in 1915 until then. The transaction was handled by her solicitors in London, as she had left the country several years earlier. They sold the place to Frederick Hornby in June 1939. I asked him if Hornby had financial backers and he said that he probably did but that he did not know who they might be.”

  “They have no floor plan of the house, then?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “There is one other detail, though. The solicitor I spoke to—he sounded quite an old gent—said that by the time she sold the estate, Lady Elton had remarried in Malta—a man named Berkshire—and therefore sold the property under her new name of Mrs. Catherine Berkshire.”

  “Did you ask him if she was still married to this Mr. Berkshire?”

  “I did and he claimed not to know. He said that once she sold the estate she dropped their firm in favor of her husband’s, which was based in Malta. After that, they lost track of her. He didn’t know the name of her husband’s firm.”

  Larkin pushed the notebook aside and withdrew a cardboard folder from a small pile of papers on his desk. He took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and used it to pluck a typewritten document from the folder.

  “I also found this among Lee’s things,” he said, laying the document before Lamb. “It’s a love letter to a woman named ‘Theresa’— who I assume is Theresa Hitchens—from ‘Alan,’ who I have to believe is Alan Fox.”

  Lamb read the brief letter.

  My darling Theresa,

  I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed our tryst of last evening. You are the sweetest, most beautiful woman I have ever known and I can’t wait until we can be together again, my love. I shall come to the pub tonight, where I hope that we can talk and meet afterward. I am sorry that the horrible little gardener from Elton House has been harassing you and intend to do something about that.

  Until then, I remain your devoted lover,

  Alan

  Lamb found the note odd. For one, its language struck him as clichéd and insincere, as if “Alan” knew nothing about how to write a proper love letter and had copied what he thought was correct from what he’d read in melodramatic novels. Although he did not know Alan Fox, really, he nonetheless doubted that Fox would have written such drivel. Indeed, Fox struck him as the kind of man who would take seducing a young woman such as Theresa Hitchens for granted. What need would he have for love letters and flowers and the rest of it? He also wondered why Fox—or anyone—would type a love letter rather than write it in their own hand.

  “Have you checked it for fingerprints?” he asked Larkin.

  “Not yet.”

  “All right, then,” Lamb said. “Keep at it and I’ll check in again with you tomorrow morning.”

  While Lamb spoke to Larkin, Wallace took the opportunity to approach Vera, as she moved down the hall from the bathroom.

  “I’m sorry about this morning,” he whispered as he sidled up to her.

  “So am I,” Vera said.

  “We must find some time to be together without anyone around.”

  “We will. I promise.”

  She glanced behind them to see if anyone was following. But they had the hall to themselves. They stopped and looked into each other’s eyes. Vera could almost feel David’s desire to speak—to say something he had been wanting to say since that morning. And yet he was communicating all the same, telegraphing a sense of anxiety and vulnerability that made her feel as if she were keeping a secret from him.

  Wallace burned to ask her again if she loved him. But he also understood that even if Vera gave him the answer he sought it might not be wholly genuine.

  Vera broke the tension between them by violating her own rule about how they should act toward each other while on duty. She put her hands on his chest and reached up and kissed him on the lips, quickly.

  Before Wallace could speak, she said, “Please don’t worry, David. We’ve plenty of time to figure things out. We’re lucky in that way—very lucky. We, both of us, have to remember that. Otherwise we’ll begin to pity ourselves and become ungrateful toward each other
.”

  She kissed him a second time—again quickly—and said, “I have to now. I will see you tomorrow and we will find a way to be alone.”

  At that moment, at a German airfield near Cherbourg, in northwest France, just across the Channel from southern England, the remnant of what once had been the Luftwaffe’s Jagdfliegergeschwader 9 prepared to launch a bombing raid.

  During the summer of 1940 the group had been among those that had relentlessly bombed southern England in preparation for what everyone then thought would be a Nazi invasion from occupied France. But the RAF had driven off the German bombers and the invasion had never come. Since then, the Luftwaffe had turned its attention to the bombing of London and then to Germany’s campaigns in North Africa, Greece, Italy, and Russia.

  Now Jagdfliegergeschwader 9 prepared to fly what would turn out to be its final mission of the war over England, and its target was Southampton.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  AT ABOUT TEN MINUTES AFTER ONE A.M. THE TELEPHONE RINGING in the downstairs hall awakened Lamb. He reached for his wife, Marjorie, and found that she still was sleeping. He pushed himself out of bed and down the steps to answer the phone.

  “This is Lamb.”

  He recognized the voice on the other end as that of the nick’s night desk sergeant, who said that a woman had just called to report that the pub in Marbury was on fire.

  “She said specifically to tell you, sir,” he said.

  “Did she give her name?”

  “No, she refused. She said only that the pub was on fire and ‘to tell the chief inspector.’ Those were her exact words.”

  “Where’s the nearest fire brigade with a working appliance?”

  “More than ten miles away.”

  “All right. Please call Rivers and tell him to meet me at the nick in twenty minutes.”